Wasteland 3

released on Aug 27, 2020

As the sole survivor of Team November, a Ranger squad dispatched to the icy Colorado wastes, you find this is a land of buried secrets, lost technology, fearsome lunatics, and deadly factions. No one here has ever heard of the Desert Rangers. Your reputation is yours to build from scratch, and your choices may save this land or doom it. With a renewed focus on macro-reactivity, you'll be picking between warring factions, deciding whether locations are destroyed or saved, and making other far reaching decisions that have a marked impact on the shape of your world.


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Buggy as hell but this is one of the games that got me through 2020. Went back in for the DLCs but they didn't give me the same feeling as the base game. I didn't even finish the nuclear church one

just couldn't get into it. I didn't really like the character designs.

This review contains spoilers

Summary: overall had a great time, between a 4 and 4.5. Don't love the combat or story enough to go higher

Pros:
- Choice and consequence is excellent. Tough choices and lasting consequences with branching outcomes. I like that you are often punished in terms of loot/money for making the "good guy" choice
- Enjoyable combat and character building
- Generally enjoyable setting/tone, certainly is unique

Cons:
- You have 6 characters and get levels quickly: can be overwhelming and hard to know how to build characters without outside help. Don't really know what the skills do before you have to make "permanent" choices, compounded by money being scarce initially (you can pay to respec). Overall not a huge negative after initial hurdle and probably fine to play completely blind, but I hate the feeling of "messing up" my characters due to the game not giving me enough information
- Combat can become a little stale towards the end of the game when you have your characters locked in
- Some humor can be hit or miss, a little overbearing

Some specific story/writing complaints:
- Why can't someone take over Gipper oil production other than cannibals?
- Angela Deth asks you to essentially commit a coup against a popular leader and presumably kill many innocent people in the process. Why would people support us after that? Also seems unrealistic how 50% of Rangers automatically turn against you
- Would've loved to have a more in depth conversation with the Patriarch or the Rangers at the end. Feels like it was missing a finale confrontation/discussion and instead I was forced into a binary decision to support Angela or not

This review contains spoilers

Every piece of art anyone has ever loved has always had some thing that grabs you, something that reaches out to you deep down into the primordial soup of your soul and stirred something ancient and powerful. Where you just know that what you’re experiencing is special, will stay with you, and will be carried with you in some way for the rest of your life. There isn’t one specific thing that grabbed me here, but its an example of a game doing everything right at every opportunity. And after an entire playthrough exposed to this uncommon level of craftsmen ship you’ll find it impossible to put the game down.
Wasteland 3 is a post apocalyptic RPG set in the state of Colorado. You play as a Desert Ranger, who after the events at the start of Wasteland 2 are having issues with food and water and staying supplied against raiders and militias. The Patriarch who rules a once united Colorado offered a deal of mutual aid, scratch his back and he will scratch yours. You set off and are ambushed in the opening cutscene leading into character creation and the tutorial dam area before youre given your base and main story and set off into the frozen night.
This is a hard one for me to talk about. Not for any specific reason, I just love it so much there’s a million things that I want to get out but its just a jumble of individual parts that I really appreciate in games that also come together to form a cohesive package that also I really like. It’s a fairly short game (for a chunky RPG), but not paced in a way that feels rushed or with any unpolished back half, running at a consistent rhythm, snappy game loop with enough rewards throughout you never feel like you’re going through the motions. That being said short is somewhat misleading. Sure, you can blow through just the story really quick, but an average playthrough taking your time and just seeing the sights you can easily rack up 40 50 hours not counting the two DLCs. The maps are dense with both combat encounters and skill checks, you’ll be using exploration skills to disarm mines, alarms, unlock doors safes and computers near constantly to the point where your lock picking character will be several levels higher then the rest of your team.
Combat plays out turn based, but with each team taking their turns as one. So, you go then the enemy goes and so forth. Because whoever initiates combat goes first and the entire team moves going first is often the only thing that decides encounters. Encounters started by dialogue will often be way harder then ones you can initiate from ‘stealth’. Stealth is fairly minimal, every enemy has a red ring around them when not in combat representing a detection range, and standing inside the ring will fill up an eye above your head and when it fills your caught. Any shot made out of combat is a sneak attack and initiates combat, the shooter will start combat as if they had already shot. Starting combat with damaged enemies, in position and a full turn is generally more than enough to either have won or impossible to lose after your first turn, and this carries over through the hardest difficulties as well.
Music is fantastic. Very moody and atmospheric as reminiscent of the classic fallouts. Where it stands out is its Hymns and Incantations. There’re several covers of old Americana patriotic and work songs as well as just some pop songs, that play as battle music for important fights, or after story events or just in some certain areas. The psychobilly vibes and covers fit the setting and elevate the games themes. The ending track with the main story beats being narrated like a campfire folk song changing depending on how you went with the kids and the civil war. The best comparison I can think of for use of music is JRPGs. Big bombastic boss themes over turn based combat is one of my favorite things. The haunting uncle acid esque folk songs really nails this and ties the experience up nicely. Again, nothing revolutionary but utilized to such a great effect it makes you wonder why we don’t see this more often.
Character building is fairly straight forward and reminds me a lot of Mass Effect 1 in lay out, but lands in a satisfying easy to learn and understand, and extremely satisfying to master. All the skills and stats are laid out in a way to be easy to understand on their own but with fun synergies between them. And weapons are grouped up in pairs which allows and encourages experimenting without you needing to know the specifics of the game. Every skill is relevant and useful in its own way as the game does not skimp out on skill checks, so this cuts down on any feel bad moments as whatever you built will have something to do.
One of my favorite aspects of RPGs is when they are static, instead of relying on a loot treadmill/slot machine pulling style of loot. Because there’s fixed loot in fixed places you can leverage game knowledge and plan out routes in a way that might be less reliable if loot was all randomly generated. That isn’t to say there isn’t random loot, there is, most safes and containers roll the loot when you open it. but what stuff you do find isn’t random. If you find a minigun it will always be the same minigun, even if you leveled up 10 times and then found another one. The entirety of wasteland 3, outside of its 2 dlcs, follow this. Which means you can from the start plan characters around specific weapons and get to them in a short amount of time. This isn’t unique to wasteland 3 but it’s a very large part to what makes the progression feel satisfying.
The game has a very loose and open structure to it, with you getting the three main quests right out the bat with the entirety of the modest open map laid out before you. There are 5ish main areas, 2 dlcs and a smattering of smaller optional areas all connected through a map you drive your Kodiak around in with progression being largely gated behind radiation shielding that becomes available as you start rounding up the patriarch’s kids. Traversing the open world is simple, slow, can be repetitive and full of both random encounters and fixed secret goodies. Random encounters always tell you what it is, with several options to either try and run, avoid it entirely, start combat or attempt to start combat with an advantage. Avoiding encounters entirely is the main focus of the survival skill, and personally I always skip them unless I’m feeling like meaningless fights, but still always having the option to fight or not is awesome. There is a radio to listen to while you’re roaming Colorado, but unlike fallout its not tuned to any specific station. Instead you will pick up broadcasts randomly as you drive around, and they usually are themed around which section of the map you’re on. These range from repeating ghost broadcasts, number stations, advertisements for a dungeons and dragons group, music introduced by a couple different DJs still on air, and the various factions spewing propaganda out, including the patriarch.
The two DLCs for Wasteland 3 are the Battle for Steeltown and Cult of the Holy Detonation. Steeltown is about the industrial heart of Colorado going haywire. Theres a worker revolt and violent union busting and a super computer gone rogue. Theres a good bit going on with choices to go lethal or non lethal agasint the workers and ghosts, siding with the workers or security and then siding with them or the administrator and then what to do with the computer. Builds on everything in wasteland 3 and introduces in the final area the concept of objectives during fights. Saying it introduces them is a bit of a lie as needing to run and interact with generators was already a thing, but in the last area of steel town you have to run and flip switches to stop reinforcements from coming in. this can be done in one turn with a mobile fast character and again, its only in the very last area of the entire dlc.
Cult of the Holy Detonation further expands on combat changes in steel town, and now you will see objectives or enemy modifies in every encounter. This dlc is essentially just a series of combat puzzles and boss fights. Youll go to a new area scout around for any advantages and then jump into a hectic endurance round of combat set to that wasteland 3 sound track we all love. The two stand outs to the soundtrack here are Power in the Blood and Making our Dreams Come True. They put the entire last fight set to a quirky upbeat fiddle hoe down song and it’s the best thing.
The downsides to both DLCs are something that gets talked about but not nearly as much as the mixed steam reviews would have you believe. For my money the worst sin they commit is level scaling, and not even on enemies. It level scales loot! The crafting blue prints you find in steeltown are set to what level you found them at meaning if there was a specific steeltown gun you want to use youre in this zone where doing it early will get you it earlier but doing it later will get you it better. Its not really a huge deal its just the only time this really comes into effect in the game, and it makes it stick out like a sore thumb. Don’t let the negative steam reviews scare you off, both of the DLCs are excellent, high quality and expand the game in only good ways. Theyre worth your time and they are worth the cost.
IN CONCLUSION
If this game came out in 2010 for the 360 it would be the greatest game of all time. But it didn’t so as it stands it remains niche, woefully underrated, and will be waiting for you to give It a fair shake, get it on sale, play it on game pass black magic it whatever, as long as more people see experience this.

I'm sorry lord but I just couldn't finish this game. I was genuinely intrigued by the story and I was enjoying the gameplay but I saw how much longer the game was going to take to beat and I just didn't have the strength. This is such a massive improvement on the other Wasteland games so I feel extra guilty lord but please forgive me, I know I have sinned but please, I will repent by purchasing three indie games on Steam without them being on sale.

dis like my first turn based rpg or wtv pretty dope, i hired a cat named tomcat in my team he died